It is so frustrating when you give up an hour of your time taking care of something that should be so easy. For me today this was an attempt to upgrade my DSL service to 3.0Mbps from my current 1.5Mbps plan.
For such a large ISP you would think Earthlink would have a system that allows Customer Service to simply check a few boxes on what the customer wants (at least for standard requests, much like upgrading your service) and a process is started and everyone gets back to work.
Today I spent over an hour getting transferred between Customer Service, Sales and Master Tech. At the end of this hour on the phone (not on hold mind you, this was an hour talking to real people) I still don’t have my request underway. I finally got advice from Sales on how to approach this, simply cancel my service and then immediately call back to sign up for the new service.
I was assured that in doing so my current email address and info would remain, and I would still appear in the system as a customer of 10 years. The fact that such a large company doesn’t have a process for such a simple request is frustrating. That gets complicated of course by the fact that the employees also seem lost in how to handle. To make matters worse, because I am an older customer I am actually paying more now for my DSL than I will for the new higher speed plan I am attempting to upgrade too.
It is a shame that smaller companies (Mindspring in this case) who pride themselves on service get absorbed by the big fish and then exchanges like the one I had today occur.
I will keep up with my saga to see what it takes in time and effort (read as my time) to get such a simple request accomplished.
